Gun statistics you seldom see

It was the sort of incident that never makes it into the official crime statistics - that is, an incident in which a crime may have been prevented by a firearm.

It happened earlier this month in Irvine. Police were looking for a man suspected of raping an 18-year-old woman in her home. As the cops searched, the fleeing suspect, a 27-year-old L.A. gang member, tried to hide by breaking into another home. Inside, the homeowner, a man who had recently undergone defensive firearms training, heard the commotion, grabbed a handgun and confronted the suspect.

The homeowner didn't shoot the alleged rapist, although legally he almost certainly could have. If someone breaks into your home, and you have a justifiable fear that he might kill or harm you or someone else, you have a right to defend yourself with lethal force.

But as I said, the homeowner - for security reasons, he declined to be interviewed or identified by name - didn't shoot. Instead, he shouted at the suspect to stop, at which point the guy ran out of the house. Shortly thereafter he was caught and arrested by the police.

"The homeowner took the appropriate safety steps," Irvine Police Lt. Rick Handfield told me. "And he had had some firearms training, which is an important part of gun ownership."

But did the homeowner's use of a gun prevent another crime from occurring - perhaps an assault on the homeowner or his family? Or would the suspect, who turned out to be unarmed, have fled when confronted by the homeowner, gun or no gun? The police can't definitively say.

So how will that incident be reflected in the crime statistics?

Yes, the rape will be added to the grim numbers of that despicable crime, and the successful arrest will appear in the Irvine Police Department's annual statistics. And ironically, if the homeowner had justifiably shot and killed the intruder it still would have been listed in the overall statistics as a gun-related homicide - the same statistics that anti-gun activists use to promote stricter so-called "gun control" laws to keep firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.

But police departments and other government agencies don't collect hard numbers on crimes that may have been prevented by armed citizens - because, as in the Irvine case, they're difficult and sometimes impossible to quantify.

And that's unfortunate. Because crimes prevented by firearms are as important in the debate over guns as crimes committed with firearms.

As you probably know, last week the U.S. Supreme Court took up the 2nd Amendment question. The case could finally decide whether the U.S. Constitution gives individuals the "right to keep and bear arms," as opposed to a collective right afforded only to organized state "militias" such as the National Guard.

(By the way, California law defines our state's "militia" as "all able-bodied male citizens â¦ between the ages of eighteen and forty-five" - which, at age 57, I find somewhat insulting and discriminatory. And in any modern application I guess we would have to include the gals in the militia, too.)

Well, I don't have enough space to go into all the 2nd Amendment arguments. But to me it's obvious that a homeowner in Irvine - or any other law-abiding citizen - has a constitutional right to have a firearm.

Of course, whenever gun ownership rights are debated, anti-gun activists like to point out that about 30,000 people are killed by guns in America every year -- although they seldom note that about 60 percent of those deaths are suicides, or that the firearm murder rate has dropped by 40 percent in the past 15 years, or that far more people are killed by motor vehicles or medical malpractice every year than are killed by guns.

And they never mention how many crimes have been prevented by citizens bearing arms.

Once again, that's a hard thing to quantify. One U.S. government survey in the 1990s estimated that more than 80,000 Americans a year used guns in an effort to protect themselves or their property against crime. Other estimates put the number far higher, at more than 2 million crimes prevented each year by the presence of privately-owned firearms.

But those are estimates and extrapolations - which means we can argue about the numbers all day long.

Still, this much is clear. When faced with a violent criminal in his house in the middle of the night, it would be hard to argue that that homeowner in Irvine would have been better off without a gun.

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